Interactive Org Charts in Online Training #43

As course designers, you’ve likely created a course or two (or more) that introduced learners to key people in your organization. Typical content includes topics like organizational structure, position rankings, leadership bios, and general contact information. New Hire 101, right?

I’ve tracked this type of interaction for a while, but never really thought of using it for a weekly challenge until I saw a Tweet from community member Cecilia Bernal. Cecilia created some fun examples using community resources. I really liked how she reworked the templates for her own Meet the Team interactions.

Org charts, family trees, meet the team, and who’s who are essentially the same diagram. They show organizational structure and the relationships of people and positions. After seeing the Cecilia’s interactions grouped together, I knew this would make a fun challenge.

Before we jump into this week’s challenge, take a look at some variations of org charts. Consider how a similar model could work for your own projects.

Family Trees

Family trees also use a tree structure to represent relationships. They can resemble a real tree or use simple shapes to show hierarchy.

Working with Photographs

Sometimes there are so many players, it might make sense to forego the individual callouts and give learners a big picture view. I like the way this courtroom interactive toggles the callouts on and off:

Learning Games

Your interactions don’t have to be click-and-reveals. Try making a game out of your org chart by asking learners to identify each role or position. Here’s an example of an interactive who’s who designed for kids:

Last Week’s Challenge

Before you introduce yourself in this week’s meet-and-greet, take a look at the smartphone videos your fellow community members shared in last week’s challenge.

More About the E-Learning Challenges:

The weekly challenges are ongoing opportunities to learn, share, and build your e-learning portfolios. You can jump into any or all of the previous challenges anytime you want. We’ll feature your work and provide feedback if you request it.

Hi everyone,
Thank you David for your words, glad to see you liked my presentations and that they inspired a Weekly challenge!.
I joined this community a couple of months ago and I’m amazed to see so much creativity and professionalism.
In my opinion, practicing is the best way to learn, I simply chose a topic and started to put some stuff together, trying to replicate other’s ideas, while learning the basic features: how to add layers, triggers, states, etc. and having fun, adding audio. “Meet the team” was my third slide and I must admit I published it thinking nobody would see it ;)
My dream is to become an e-learning designer, so I decided to participate in some of the previous challenges (better late than never), cause sharing ideas and having feedback from you is best w... Expand

Hi everyone,
Thank you David for your words, glad to see you liked my presentations and that they inspired a Weekly challenge!.
I joined this community a couple of months ago and I’m amazed to see so much creativity and professionalism.
In my opinion, practicing is the best way to learn, I simply chose a topic and started to put some stuff together, trying to replicate other’s ideas, while learning the basic features: how to add layers, triggers, states, etc. and having fun, adding audio. “Meet the team” was my third slide and I must admit I published it thinking nobody would see it ;)
My dream is to become an e-learning designer, so I decided to participate in some of the previous challenges (better late than never), cause sharing ideas and having feedback from you is best way of achieving my goal.
Looking forward to seeing the awesome examples you’ll come up with!

@Cecilia: Welcome to the community. I only recently got involved but it's a wonderful group of people. I've learned so much by working through these challenges.
@Louisa and @David: You are both setting the bar for this challenge!

Hey guys! Here are links to my submission for this week's challenge. I had a lot of fun with this one. Inspiration was pouring from me this week.
Link to published version: http://bit.ly/UgTw0D
Link to related blog post: http://bit.ly/1sAlEL9
BONUS STUFF:
Time-lapse video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKzz03zdqIg
Template download: http://bit.ly/1sAkI9q
P.S., I included a little Easter egg in my submission. Let me know if you find it!
ENJOY!

Louisa - As a Dutchman I really like the orange. Great job!
Cecilia - Welcome, Thanks for sharing your inspiring designs. Hope to see more of your work in future challenges.
David Glow - thanks for sharing this neat and interactive design. love it!

Tim - Like I already mentioned on twitter. Awesome...not only the design. Even as a fanatic user of Apple products I didn't know that their products are featured in the permanent collections of museums worldwide.

Thank you everybody for the warm welcome.
@Tim, great design, thanks for sharing it and showing the creation process. I found the Easter egg ;)
@Louisa and @David: nicely done! I like the idea of challenging the learner to discover who is who in the team.

Great challenge idea, @Cecilia! Your volleyball example was really creative. Thanks for mentioning my tabs interaction.
@Louisa You weren't kidding about the orange! The subtle textured background reduces some contrast so that was a really good idea. I also liked how you included scrolling panels for some of the divisions.
@David: LOVE your clean and elegant org chart. I feel that design style could carry an entire course.
@Tim: I don't know how you regularly create design-rich demos so quickly. If you have any secrets or tips, please send them my way.
I'm sure I created a dozen "meet the team" interactions over the past two years. Here are a few concepts that I put together for clients and previous challenges:
Meet Your Leadership (v1): http://elearningdesigner.com/storyli... Expand

Great challenge idea, @Cecilia! Your volleyball example was really creative. Thanks for mentioning my tabs interaction.
@Louisa You weren't kidding about the orange! The subtle textured background reduces some contrast so that was a really good idea. I also liked how you included scrolling panels for some of the divisions.
@David: LOVE your clean and elegant org chart. I feel that design style could carry an entire course.
@Tim: I don't know how you regularly create design-rich demos so quickly. If you have any secrets or tips, please send them my way.
I'm sure I created a dozen "meet the team" interactions over the past two years. Here are a few concepts that I put together for clients and previous challenges:
Meet Your Leadership (v1): http://elearningdesigner.com/storyline/characters/
Meet Your Leadership (v2): http://elearningdesigner.com/storyline/elearning-characters/
Meet Your New Team: http://elearningdesigner.com/photo-collage-elearning-challenge/

Tim, Montse, top quality as ever! David G. love your example I had a similar thing in mind but had so many people in y my org chart it would just be annoying to drag and drop them all over :)
Cecilia and Louisiana, great to see you taking part in the challenges

Here's my entry for this week: http://www.seriouslearning.nl/challenges/Ch43/story.html
Like David G. I'd considered making it as a drag and drop interaction but seeing as how many attempts it might take to get it right I curbed that thought and went with the simple click-and-reveal interaction.
An interesting addition might be a short video from the actual person explaining who they are and what they do to make it more personal. Unfortunately Atsumi and the rest of the team weren't available on such short notice ;)

It's been awhile since I've participated in one of these and I really loved this challenge idea! So I had to throw together my own example! :)
View published demo here: http://bit.ly/WlhrgQ
There's also another Meet the Team style interaction that I created awhile ago for a Weekly Challenge Compilation: http://bit.ly/1nJwQNP (download) and http://bit.ly/1k3f7Gk (published output)
Jeff - LOVE your concept and the execution is awesome. What a fun and original idea...Well done!

@ Cecilia I think you're committed to participating after this one:-) Thanks again for sharing your examples and inspiring what should be one of our most popular challenges.
@David - Sweet job with the drag-drop org chart. I agree w/ the others that the simple design really works.
@Tim - Thanks so much for sharing your template. I'll add it to next week's template recap post. Thx!
@Montse - Those demos look great. Any chance you'll leverage that project for an interactive chart? #nudge
@Jeff - Cool idea using the perspective chart. Adds some really great depth to the interaction.
@Nicole - Thanks so much for jumping into the challenge. Any chance you'll make that super cool org chart template available? Just asking because I'm sure you'll receive a lot of requests:-)

Really sweet ideas coming out from the contributors (as usual).
My content that the org chart interaction had an interactive timeline activity we scrapped- so I posted it to the timeline challenge thread just now (including source for folks to use).
http://community.articulate.com/blogs/david/archive/2013/11/22/weekly-challenge-interactive-timelines-for-e-learning.aspx?CommentPosted=true#283189

Tnx for the kind words everyone, can't take much design credits on my entry as I totally based of an image I found on Pinterest. I just took it to the next level adding the interactivity. Creating it was super easy in Storyline... I might just recreate it and do a timelapse video like Tim did... that was soooo cool!

@Jeff - There's no shame finding inspiration elsewhere! In fact, that would be a fun weekly challenge (David!). I regularly look on Pinterest for user interface/graphic design ideas. Maybe we each find a image from Pinterest and build a couple of examples slides from that inspiration.
P.S., Thanks for the kind words on the time-lapse video! (That would be a fun challenge too!).

So great examples so far! It’s amazing to see in how many styles an org chart can be shaped!
From your professional experience, could you please comment if there is any style that is more requested / successful than other?
Thank you!

@David -The challenge could be about finding inspiration and using it to create an eLearning design/concept. I'm often inspired by images I find on Pinterest under the graphic design section.
It doesn't have to be Pinterest. Maybe it's a particular website or some other item of media that provides the inspiration. The whole point of the challenge would be to find inspiration and use it to for eLearning, and the describe how you found the inspiration and used it to create the final design.
I think a lot of new eLearning designers struggle finding inspiration, so it would be an interesting exercise to explore how an idea/inspiration results in a final concept.